Getting to Sanyu

10/11/12

First of all from the moment we landed in Addis Abebe in Ethiopia the people around me were very friendly and very communal towards one another regardless of whether or not they were meeting for the first time. One woman on the shuttle taking us to our last flight asked where we were going, and turns out she was going to Kampala too! Her name is Rosette, and when we told her we were staying at Sanyu Babies Home she recounted a very personal story to us about an experience her family had with Sanyu.

When Rosette was a teenager in Kampala, her mother's friend was walking in the park and saw an infant girl laying on the ground. Infant as in a baby girl still covered in afterbirth with an umbilical chord was laying on the ground in the park. This friend took the baby to the most 'motherly' person she knew- Rosette's mother, and they took in the baby girl and cared for her for a few months until Sanyu took her in. From then on Rosette would visit the baby girl every weekend until she was adopted later that year.

On the plane ride over the man sitting next to me asked if this was my first time going to Uganda and when I said this is my first time going to Africa everyone sitting around us turned and welcomed me!

The plane landed in Entebbe Airport at around 1:30am. We all herded down to baggage claim and after 20 minutes of watching the empty carousal spinning around, an employee comes out to tell us that our luggage was never boarded onto the plane. By this time in my life I’ve probably flown on over 150 airplanes and I still don’t understand how our plane managed to take off without having ANY luggage loaded on to it, but apparently that’s what happened. It took 2 hours for me, along with 60 or so other people on our flight, to file a ‘lost baggage’ report to the 3 employees working at that desk. What this means is that I did not leave the Entebbe airport until around 4am, and I left empty handed. It’s since been 2 days and I still have nothing except the clothes I wore the whole trip over, slept in that night, worked in with the babies all afternoon, and slept in again the next night, and what I’m still wearing now about to work with the babies again! I really want my stuff back…

Fact of the day: String beans, in Uganda, are called French beans.